Holiday mayhem

[CableRoad]

I always enjoy revisiting Cookie McClung’s comic piece on cooking the feast on a foxhunting day.

This year in my house, a set of dirty polo wraps went through the washing machine with the ancestral cut-lace linens from the Thanksgiving table. Fortunately, we are tidy horsemen; the polos’ velcro was fastened, and there were no casualties to great-grandmother’s handiwork. (Just my panic attack!)

What holiday chaos stories do others have?

[MadTrotter]

Not horse related but…my family doesn’t like turkey so everything Thanksgiving growing up my mom ordered a Kentucky ham, old fashioned, very special.

One year I heard her screams from the kitchen. She was standing over the gorgeous ham, having just sliced into it. Knife quivering, she recoiled in horror. Inside the ham were long white streaks. WORMS?! In the HAM?!? What was going on? She called a family friend, a butcher, and they tried to figure out what kind of exotic parasite had infected the pig.

Fast forward to the next day, after she had already disposed of the whole thing, not even chancing its dispersal to the dogs…

She had run out of toothpicks to hold the pineapple on and had used SPAGHETTI. The “worms” in the ham were pieces of cooked pasta!

[MHM]

Hilarious. Lol.

What was for dinner that year after the ham mishap?

[Demerara_Stables]

Kind of a sad story, but my maternal Grandma passed unexpectedly in October one year. My mom has 4 brothers, all with kids, so the holidays were always an amazing, busy, fun time.

The year she passed, we all got together but a regular Christmas felt weird. Grandpa’s house needed to be re roofed so we did that instead. My uncles are quite handy so we did it all ourselves, including my boyfriend (now husband). We were all up on the roof on Christmas day in 85° weather (thanks Florida) and had pizza for dinner. No big dinner, no gifts. It was sad, but felt right, and that’s what Grandma would have wanted - getting sh*t done.

[MadTrotter]

Just sides! Sad, lonely sides